OCR Text |
Show Utah Yields Rare Fossils Washington Fossil deposits of the earliest known animal life on earth, dating back between one ad two billions bil-lions of years, furnished the material for field work in Utah and Montana from which Dr. Charles E. Resser and Erwin R. Pohl, Smithsonian paleontologists, pal-eontologists, have just returned. These fossils are found in the Cambrian rocks. The consist mailny of trilobites a crustacean line which became extinct ex-tinct about the time the coal measures were deposited. Their closest modern relative is the brine-shrimps those curous creatures co abundant in the Great Salt Lake and in the Dead sea. A billion and a half years ago these trilobites were the dominant life in the sea, there being, so far as is known, no land animals. Up to the present time about 2000 different kinds of them are known from the Cambrian alone. |